Any problems at one of these facialites is a concern but if a mouse farts it's treated like like epic disaster. That is good in one sense but it certainly doesn't add to the confidence of the general public if it's a "nothing to see here" event...

I live directly across the river from TMI and can see the Unit 2 cooling towers from my master bedroom windows. There were no sirens, no warnings, nothing when the release occurred. AAMOF the first my wife and I heard about it was the Channel 8 morning news.

If it were anything to worry about, it would be plastered all over the world news.

At a Nuke plant everything gets reported, no matter how small. At my plant, we found a hole in our containment liner. News had a field day with it. Bottom line it was found during a regular inspection that we do to find these problems, so the process worked and was addressed before it became a problem. But to the general public it sounded like we were trying to kill everyone. It was a rust hole, smaller than a paper clip, in a 1 inch thick piece of steel, that had over 4 feet of heavily reinforced concrete on the outside of it.

Another thing I just worked on was fixing a crack in a weld. We just spent 10 million dollars to repair a crack that was not visible to the naked eye and estimated to be 1/2inch long. Again something that we regularly inspect for so we catch problems before they become a safety risk.

Freddy wrote: I thought we'd see a few new nuclear plants start construction this year....it's almost Christmas & I haven't heard a thing.

For one thing I'd imagine many are reluctant to begin such heavy investments because of the energy bill. If they are mandated to put in X amount of renewable energy over the next few decades that's where they will be spending money.

I can remember quite a long time ago when there was a nuclear shall we say big problem at a Westinghouse research plant off of I-70, Waltz Mills, Pa. it was covered up & little or nothing was ever made of it. I`m guessing because it was a researce plant & the first mishap they were able to keep it quiet, probably learned alot since then, hopefully anyway anything that you can`t see, smell or hear scares me.

DVC500 at last wrote:Probably due to prep work, IE. shutting down the reactor, causing lost revenue, etc.....

That's what Westinghouse and the Craft Unions charge us for their services!! That doesn't even include lost revinue. We are shut down for a refueling outage.

The main reason for the cost is the crack was in a high radiation field, so as much as posible was done robotically. We did have to have people go into the high radiation field so it also required alot of people since by law, these people could only be exposed to the high radiation field for a short time, then they were maxed out for our plant. The amount of exposure these people were getting is actually only close to the average background amount that most people in the US see per year. About 900mR.

Freddy wrote: I thought we'd see a few new nuclear plants start construction this year....it's almost Christmas & I haven't heard a thing.

Economy has slowed that down quite a bit. The power industy took quite a hit due to the reduction in production and even greater drive for efficiency in industry to make it through the recession. My company lost a significant % in revinue, especially since 40% of our sales is to the auto industry. They quit making cars and paying their electric bill, we get screwed.

Not to mention our current government is not very pro nuke. They would rather bail out the auto industry rather than build our infrastructure and reliance on fossil fuels.